[ARC Tech-109]

I'd be interested as well. I was still with the training dept at this time and much of my work was centered around video productions be it instructional or talking heads in the bored room and DV was gaining ground in this arena. I was entrenched in BetaSP and just starting to make the transition to DigiBeta as it was far more key friendly so we never really embraced the DV be it DVCAM or DVCPRO but there was some Sony DSR field equipment floating around. Vendors would often provide their product promos on DV be it the professional and semi-pro and it all merged well in the final product if everything was kept digital either by SDI or 1394. I can't say the DV format machines were very robust or reliable and none of them had their lids screwed down should a tape need to be retrieved.

I don't know how well something like an internal DVCPRO tape drive would do in the real world, there were some rather crude attempts by Matrox and others to make video capture cards that were rather high priced for the prosumer market, add the price of a feeder deck and this concept starts to look really good especially for the digital desktop user who doesn't do the sheer volume of the big production houses. A simple internal peripheral that could be installed by a layperson under say Windows NT-4 or later 2000 in the day I think would have done quite well especially if it had native small DV tape support built in for the Handycam crowd. I remember some early resistance to digital by the big broadcast boys when it included the word compression but they did after all make DigiBeta one of the most successful digital formats to date and that uses a very mild DCT and 4-2-2 sub-sample, that being said there was some limited use of DVCAM for ENG during the early days and the format has since evolved into the HD world as DVCPRO-HD. I have a Panasonic AJ-HD150 editor deck with the UDC150 conversion board that does 1080i but can't say it's the most reliable but it does an excellent job of upconverting SD to HD in real time, conceptually the internal DVCAM drive could have evolved with the technology but it's unknown how that would have affected the sales of the stand-alone machines. Panasonic has always had some oddball & off-the-wall ideas floating around their world and being a fan of the Matsushita branded products I can't say they all made sense. I look at the MII format and scratch my head.
At this point it's all solid state storage and the tape formats are nothing more than relics for us lunatics who can't seem to let go of the good ol' days. To quote ChrisW6ATV tagline: "Quote from another forum: "(Antique TV collecting) always seemed to me to be a fringe hobby that only weirdos did." I wonder what they would say about tape deck collecting, I have Type-C in my living room.

ChrisW6ATV: If you don't have any luck going back into the AVS forum archives let me know, I'm on the administrative side of OneFora the host of the forum and might be able to dig deeper.